


Forgive The Children We Once Were

by noncorporealform



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, M/M, Poverty, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-18
Packaged: 2018-01-19 21:48:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1485241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noncorporealform/pseuds/noncorporealform
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky's afternoon jogs in Manhattan trigger memories. Post-Winter Soldier and Pre-First Avenger memories intertwine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forgive The Children We Once Were

He remembers running. Manhattan at dusk, and the train’s going to be at the station any minute. If he can make it to the train it’s going to be alright. Home’s just forty-five minutes away. Everything’s going to be okay. He doesn’t hear them anymore, but that doesn’t mean they won’t come out of nowhere. He’s listening for the jangling of keys, the sound of leather holsters bouncing as they run after him. The air that enters his lungs is early summer warm, and he knows he can make it. Just get home, he thinks.

But he can’t let himself get collared. Steve would know.

#

The streetlights in New York are different in the twenty-first century. They used to be all orange, but there’s blue in them now. When he was attending classes, Steve explained why it looked so nice, even though the new lights are safer, more ‘energy efficient’. Complimentary colors, orange against a sky that wasn’t black, but deep blue. Steve saw things that way, so Bucky started to as well, just after he would tell him these things he had picked up. Of course the sky was blue at night. Why hadn’t he seen it before? He’d just had to take a proper look.

With his long-sleeved hoodie and gloves, nobody sees him as anything else but another man. But as the weather went further towards summer and they left spring behind, he wondered how much longer until people starting to look at him and wonder—

Bucky was thinking in profiles, in suspicions, in deeply-ingrained training. He shook it off. _You’re just being a normal person. You’re taking a jog. Nobody expects you to be the Winter Soldier anymore._

#

“Why do you smell?” Steve asked.

Bucky hid that another wave of sweat had come over him with the way that he laughed, a prickling of fear opening his pores with its needles nonetheless. He shoved Steve’s head slightly as he messed up his hair, called him a punk. 

“Jerk,” Steve says, casually pushing his hair back as he laughs. “Did you run home?”

“It was hot on the train,” Bucky said. “And then I ran from the train.”

“Why?”

“Because I knew it was spaghetti night.”

“It’s spaghetti without sauce night,” Steve corrected. “But I got some stuff thanks to Mrs. Allen downstairs. She gave me a nickel for taking out her garbage today. That’s enough for some vegetables.”

Bucky has a thought of dropping the thirty bucks he made that night right on the table, say Steve can have sauce if he wants, and meat even at the price it’s at. He stops himself, fingers his pocket just to know that the bills were still there. 

“Hey, are you still going to take those classes at Parsons?”

Steve shrugged, pulled the pasta off the open flame of the gas stove, before clicking it off. There’s a little grunt as he dumps the heavy pot of water and noodles into a strainer. 

“It got a little pricey,” Steve said. “I’m not gonna go. There’s always next semester.”

“Did you withdraw?” Bucky asks, and there’s an edge in his voice, an anger. 

“I’m doin’ it tomorrow.”

Bucky stands, digs into his pocket, takes out twenty out of the thirty. He comes close to Steve, who sees the sudden closeness and steps back before being backed into the sink. The whole apartment empty except the two of them but Bucky moving in on Steve like they’re trying to move something illegal in Penn Station at five in the afternoon.

“Take it,” Bucky says.

“Bucky,” is all Steve can say.

“I’m giving it to you.”

“Where did this come from?”

“I had a good week.”

“But how?”

“I’ve been doing odd jobs. Don’t worry about it.”

“What kind of—?”

“Old ladies giving me nickels for taking out their trash.”

Steve opens his mouth, closes it once he realizes he won’t get it out of him. 

“We should use this to pay the electric bill,” Steve says as he takes it out of his hands. 

“No,” Bucky said, thinking of the other ten in his pocket. “It’s already taken care of. You be the big dumb New Yorker artist. Make us Brooklyn kids proud when you got something hanging in the Met, ok?”

He held Steve by the back of the head, bent his neck down until their foreheads were touching. He looked down at the way Steve’s face looked when his eyes were closed. He tried not to think about how much he adored this kid.

“Thank you. I’ll make it up somehow. I promise.”

“Put me in one of your paintings,” and Bucky’s stroking his cheek with his thumb. “But make me look good. Not all in pieces like Picasso does it.”

“Sure,” Steve says and smiles when he opens his eyes again to look up at him.

Bucky smiles back, gently raps his face with an open palm.

 _Don’t you kiss him_ , Bucky thinks. _You got no right._

“I’m starvin’,” he says. “Let’s eat.”

#

“He’s responding well to the treatment,” Dr. Verity says. “But his recovery of memory is not what we’d hoped for.”

“If he’s responding well, then why is it not what you hoped for?” Steve asked.

Dr. Verity’s office had that refurbished office smell, since all the facilities the New S.H.I.E.L.D. had bought were also new, far away from any holdings that could have Hydra ties to them. Sawdust and carpet glue. But Verity’s things were old, like her books with spines that spoke of a lot of wear. Steve saw central park and the rest of Manhattan stretching out beyond her thirtieth story window like those new HD TVs that were too bright and made everything look fake. 

“There’s not a lot I can say without breaking doctor-patient confidentiality, even if you are his primary source of support right now. You have to remember that I did recommend you allow him to stay at our facility, but the fact that you have volunteered to look after him does not mean you have access to anything beyond what is necessary to know for your own safety.”

“I understand that, I just—,” Steve grasped for the right way to say it. “I hate it. I hate knowing that he comes here almost every day and people are poking and prodding him.”

“Captain, a few tests in a few machines once and a while is not tantamount to prolonged torture, isolation, and brainwashing. He spends most of his sessions talking or, more likely, refusing to talk. The most technology I use on him is the ambient yoga soundtrack on my iPod for progressive muscle relaxation. You don’t have anything to worry about him. Unless you’ve noticed something in the home. Have you? Captain Rogers—”

“No. Nothing to worry about.”

#

It was the rich guys. That was a good thing; and it was the worst, too. There was something about these people who had always had money, something missing out of them. That part of them that saw people as anything but tools just atrophied at some point and fell away. At least, that was what Bucky thought. So he could always rely on them. 

Bucky could make himself look like he belonged in the place, just enough to get in. He had two good pairs of shoes and he kept them shined, the laces replaced every so often. It made everything else make sense: the way he did his hair, the pin on his tie. Just this side of upper middle class. At least, that’s how the bouncers and doormen saw him. 

The rich guys, they could smell the poverty on him, the orphanage, the hanging laundry he did himself, the boiled food. Leaned in close to really soak it in. 

He’s been told by these guys how beautiful he is, and he smiles as he thinks to himself that he’ll never use that word again. Not to the prettiest dame in the world, not to anybody.

A walk to the silver elevator with the green and purple carpeting that matched the carpeting on the fourth floor. Quick walk to room 408, the guy pulling on his tie like he’s a sauntering puppy.

There are two other guys inside. He offers himself to them, too. He thinks about the pain in his belly, about the fact that it’s the same pain that Steve will have the next day if he doesn’t do this. He smiles as he learns how much they truly hate him.

He swears he’ll set that room on fire one day.

#

When Bucky opens the door to the apartment he shares with his former target, he doesn’t say anything when Steve says, “welcome home.” His hood is still up and his path to the refrigerator is direct, as straight a line as anything non-mechanical has ever gone. He opens the fridge and takes out the orange juice, twists off the top, chugs down half the bottle. He throws it back in hard enough that the plastic shelf rattles, and the refrigerator door slams shut when he swings it closed. 

“How are you today?” Steve asks. 

“You ask me that question,” Bucky says, breath only slightly heavier after a long run. “Every day. I say the same thing. Why do you ask?”

“What else am I going to do? So: how are you today?”

“I’m _fine_.”

“Still that bad, huh?”

Bucky’s eyes were severe as they glared from the corner of his hood, between strands of long hair. Steve’s face on the other hand was level, but open. Bucky wanted to throw something at him.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he announced.

“I need to talk to you.”

“I smell bad.”

He shakes his head, something not right, but Bucky pushes it away. He hadn’t cared about the way he smelled for years.

“I’m going to be gone for a few days.”

Bucky stopped, turned. Steve looked sorry, but Bucky couldn’t tell about what.

“I can’t talk about it, but it might be a lead, or it might be a dead end.”

“Hydra?”

“Yeah.”

Bucky nods, has no idea how hollow his eyes are when he’s looking at nothing these days. He gets so angry when he looks at Steve’s face and there’s pity there. It’s there in that moment, and Bucky’s brow furrows.

“Well I’ll try not to throw any parties, Dad,” Bucky says and he disappears into the bathroom. 

#

Bucky grabs the mail out of the box with his key, doesn’t really look at the five letters in his hands at first. They’ll all be bills, he’s certain. Only shuffles through them absently as he’s walking up the second flight of stairs, notices one of them is a postcard. 

His heavy footfall stops. He looks down at what it says on the top left corner.

SELECTIVE SERVICE  
OFFICIAL BUSINESS

The draft boards address under it, and his name on the postcard.

 _No_. He can’t even say the word out loud. He sits down, puts his head in his hands. He just pictures Steve alone in that shitty apartment, the only thing making it less shitty the fact that it’s the one they share. And the bills. The things Steve won’t have. The complete embarrassment of the fact that he’ll be that kid again digging around his pockets because he was sure there was a nickel in there for the sandwich, he swears, and Bucky won’t be there to spot him. 

He argues for days that he’s a conscientious objector, looks through every draft law, but they see right through him. 

“That one’s gotta have a dame at home,” says the guy at the board office to his aide when he thinks Bucky is too far away to hear him. In his march out of the board headquarters he’d never worn his complete scorn for the world so readily on his face. For once he lets the people watching him walk by know exactly how much he hates them. 

When he gets home he tells Steve the news, about how he enlisted, his lips pulled up in a proud, bashful smile. Steve isn’t even a little angry, he isn’t thinking about the bills, or about what it means for him at all. And then Bucky tells him he’ll be in the 107th, yeah, that 107th, like Joseph Rogers. Steve has never looked prouder. He looks at him like he’s already won the war, and returned a hero. And Bucky buries the part of him that died from how Steve looked at him. Like he was the bravest man in the world.

A week later, Bucky finds it, the second enlistment application, stamped 4F. He covers his face with his hand, no idea how he’ll stop him now.

#

It’s wasn’t Hydra, never was. A false trail, because somebody was pulling their chains. They would know soon enough where they should have really been if it weren’t for the distraction, the little town in the heartland, half-built with former corporations funded by Hydra-mandated earmarks. But it was a ping, and the new S.H.I.E.L.D. had come running.

Steve had seen devastation but never this exact flavor. Hydra had run this place, and the people, into the ground. Steve started talking to folks, a cap pulled low and that seemed to be enough for people not to know the guy asking them the questions he was asking was Captain America. Because who would talk about where they got their meth with the Cap? He sat and introduced himself as Agent Rogers, and he’d ask them questions. There was a woman, marks on her arm. But all she wanted to talk about was her sister.

“I just started noticing she would have money. Just, out of nowhere, whenever we needed it. I didn’t want to think about it, but I think I always knew. Big messy handfuls of bills, those don’t come out of bank tills.”

An image from 1942 slammed into Steve like a bullet train. Bucky standing close to Steve in the kitchen, making him take the money for that class, before his life became about the war, about enlisting. Bucky always had money. Somehow, he’d always say he’d have it, and he kept his promise. The way Bucky could easily slide the conversation along, the way the idea of odd jobs paying the bills sounding completely rational to Steve. 

Steve stood outside himself, looked at the man out of time. Technically a 97 year-old and he was still figuring out the world, like there were slices of it that no one ever shone a light into for him to see. Not until it was far too late for him to do anything about the state of things. 

And Bucky. Bucky was back in his apartment. Their apartment. Trying to remember. 

“Captain Rogers?” said a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent when he comes back from the diner where the interviews were held. He tosses off his baseball cap and heads towards one of the black military cars.

“This situation is under control,” he says. “I gotta get back.”

“Alright, just remember that—”

“I gotta get back,” he repeats before he gets in the car. 

He sits in it for a second and touches his closed fist to his mouth, remembering foreheads touching, wanting it to be something more, just a little knowledge of what that would be like. Wondered what it meant that he thought about that sometimes. Wondered what it meant that Bucky always pulled away when Steve tried to make it the most obvious that it was okay if he closed the space.

Then he wondered what it must have felt like for Bucky to come home from that and to have Steve be just another person wanting him. 

He buckled his seatbelt and drove off in a bigger hurry than he intended.

#

It’s Manhattan in the evening and Bucky is running. The water in central park under the bridge is rushing and he likes the sound. He likes that a lot of this is familiar. Not many things had been torn down, bricks replaced with shining metal, or grass with a parking lot. There were still the trees in central park, and the bridges, the big, stupid rocks. Bucky had a kind of solace, thinking it would all be here even if he wasn’t. World goes on and on and maybe that’s not so bad since it’s not his time to miss.

He slows down his jog. He takes a breather, decides to get out of the park. Walks and gets as lost as he can in a city laid out on a grid and him with a mind that memorizes every corner detail for strategy. 

He sees it and he stops like a clockwork tin soldier whose key hadn’t been turned in a very, very long time. 

The hotel doesn’t even have a bar on the bottom floor anymore. It’s pure business, for travelers stopping in for conventions, meetings, state matters. The doorman is no longer a gatekeeper for taste; he’s there for show, to make him feel welcome. 

He’s got a paper bag in his hand. Walks up to the desk. Asks for room 408. Won’t budge when they try to sell him anything else. But the room is reserved, the occupants scheduled to check in before midnight. Bucky nods, thanks them. Gets into the elevator, but not until it looked like he had left. The carpet is gone, the elevator is new and the floor is wood. It doesn’t match the beige carpet when he gets out on the fourth floor. 

Who needs card keys when you’ve got a metal arm? The door flies open and the shiny, perfectly round knob is crushed into a shape like a half-moon. The room inside is lit up with the light from a lowering sun. It looks smaller. Smells different. New hardware, new furniture and bedding. But it’s the same. Exactly the same.

He pulls the fire alarm first. The ringing is up and down the hall, above him, below him. The sound of people scattering, but no panic. Loud complaints about unnecessary fire drills. He soaks the bed with the lighter fluid, throws the TV on the ground where it shatters; he soaks the dresser, then the carpet. When he lights the matches the whole book goes up. He drops it. He watches the flames eat everything for a solid minute. 

He doesn’t have to run, but he does, because he remembers hearing the shout from the entrance of that same hotel. The three of them, the ones whose money he’d taken, and the police are there shouting and there’s a few people in handcuffs. A raid. It would be in the papers. One of them points over to him and Bucky saw his own face in black and white halftone in a collection of mugshots in the morning paper. It would be public knowledge, everybody would know what he got arrested for. Steve would know what he got arrested for. 

He ran as fast as he could, still in his jogging clothes, through Manhattan as dusk fell. He can hear the police whistles that aren’t there, and his heart rate picks up as he hears the fire engine, which is definitely there. It’s just 45 minutes and then he’ll be home. Just above the entrance to the train station he stops like he hit a solid wall.

_Home’s not that way._

#

Steve comes in through the front door with a duffel and his shield and both get tossed by the front door to rest against the wall, the door closing behind him. He calls Bucky’s name, and the apartment looks empty for a moment. Steve feels panic as he tries to figure out where he would be if not here.

“Welcome home,” came a voice and Steve turned to see Bucky sitting in the darkest corner, sunk low into the couch. 

His face was deep-set with misery. He wasn’t looking at Steve, but firmly faced empty space, looking at the hall beyond the kitchen. 

“Was something burning?” Steve asked.

Bucky smiled. Steve knew something had burned. He made a mental note to check the paper in the morning. And then Bucky tremored. His face fell into a tight pinch of brows and shut eyes.

“I’m—I’m remembering. I’ve been remembering.”

“Yeah?” Steve had the worst feeling of presentiment, had actually been having it since he heard the woman speak. But Steve still didn’t know, not yet, not really. “What do you remember?”

“I remember—I remember Brooklyn. I remember the apartment. I remember what I did to keep it, to keep you. I remember—I must have really loved you. Scrawny, dumbass Steve Rogers who attracted bullies like flies. What was it about you that made most people want to punch you in the face? But not me. I had to keep you _safe_.”

He spat out the last word like it was laced with spoiled vinegar. Steve was frozen in place, his hands opening and closing. He couldn’t do anything with his strength, and there was nothing he could say with words, either. Except to ask.

“Why?”

“Shut up.”

“Bucky, please. Tell me why.”

“I don’t know. I’m not that person anymore.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“I’m not.”

“Bucky, I know you. You’ve changed but I still know you. This is exactly how you get when you’re scared as hell.”

“The punchable thing. I’m starting to get it.”

“Bucky, you’re not a bully. Of all things, I know that.”

Bucky turned his head to put the full brunt of his glare at Steve. Then his face fell, like he was seeing something other than what he had expected to find when he turned his head. He was breaking apart as Steve watched and there was nothing either of them could do about it. They both knew he had to break. Or it would be silence, and glares, and walls, walls, walls. 

Of all things, Bucky smiled and laughed. His exposed teeth were gritted, the skin under his eyes tight, his eyes filled with tears that Steve could see he would rather swallow than shed. Bucky bit his lips between his teeth, tried to stop himself, only shook. 

Steve pulled a chair close, so he could sit right in front of him. Bucky was still holding his lips between his teeth. 

“You needed someone to look after you. I was gonna be that person. You were this dumb little guy and nobody was doing it, and I—I’d seen some other kids in the orphanage, they would make this money and I just—”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yeah I did. I remember. God, if I didn’t, if I hadn’t—you would have been eaten alive. And then where would we be?”

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you were a kid, too?”

Bucky rolled his eyes, his head falling back onto the couch cushions. “Nobody looks out for kids like me. I mean—a kid like I used to be.”

“I can do it now.”

“But I’m not a kid anymore.”

“So? Who cares? I’ll never make up the debt I owe you, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t feel like a debt. I would have done anything for you just for being my friend. The only reason I wasn’t helping you before was I didn’t know you were alive. But I will never let anyone pull you out of your life again. Not ever. I’m gonna stand between you and them, whoever the hell they are. So don’t tell me I can’t help you. That’s the one thing you can’t ask me to do.”

Bucky lifted his head with a sharp inhale and he stared directly at Steve, his eyes shining like pins.

“Oh,” Bucky said.

“What?”

“That’s why.”

Bucky leaned forward, kissed him, barely pushing his lips against the other man’s. Steve was frozen. He pulled away, his hand grasping the back of Steve’s head. For a moment he was in a kitchen in Brooklyn and Steve was that little guy he had to bend down to get to, and he smelled the cheap pasta and boiled vegetables. Wondered how decades ago Steve could have given him this same look he gave him now, blue eyes heavy with exactly what was missing from the men who brought him to back rooms and cheap hotels before chasing him out, and he never considered he deserved this at all. Not from anybody, and certainly not from Steve.

“Shoulda done that ages ago,” Bucky said, in a voice deep with the drunkness of all the sorrow he’d swallowed.

“Yes,” Steve said. “Yes, you should have.”


End file.
